I suspect that we shouldn’t talk about “work” in abstract, because the details matter a lot. People can feel tired after returning from a job, and yet work hard the whole weekend on their hobby without getting tired.
To me it feels like after my brain accumulates a certain amount of frustration, it stops being efficient, until it gets a reset. The reset may be simply taking a lunch, especially if I succeed to forget about my work during the lunch.
Difficulty of work is not a problem per se. This weekend I studied a lot about jQuery and ePub, for fun. My work usually isn’t more difficult than that. What makes me feel tired is: meetings, frequent artificial deadlines, unclear assignments, communication with not-friendly people, etc. I can work 12 hours a day on my hobby. I cannot imagine working more than 8 hours a day (and I strongly wish I could work much less) on a job as usual.
To build on this, most online articles aren’t even based on the research that lynettebye was covering here. Instead, they’re based on polls and surveys, often by marketing companies. If we’re lucky, it’s associative data from epidemiological studies linking work issues to disease.
In those polls and surveys, they’re often pointing out that people are wasting time on too much frustrating, un-chosen work, and that as a consequence of the amount of nonsense they have to put up with, they only get a few hours of productive work in per day.
This gets spun as “people can only work a few productive hours per day,” as if it was innate human capacity, rather than crappy work conditions, that were the limiting factor.
Yeah. How long I can work depends on how crappy the work is. This could also explain why CEOs and similar are happy to spend long hours at job… they probably have way more power over their working conditions than I do. Pretty sure they have a room where they can close the door for a moment.
Sounds like you’re describing autonomy, mastery, and meaning—some of the big factors that are supposed to influence job satisfaction. 80,000 Hours has an old but nice summary here https://80000hours.org/articles/job-satisfaction-research. I expect job satisfaction and the resulting motivation make a huge difference on hours you can work productively.
With motivation, focusing on your work is easy. Without motivation, you burn your self-discipline, and then you give up.
So, without motivation it becomes a question of how many hours worth of self-discipline you have, or rather how many you can pretend you have. With motivation, it is only a question of what else do you also need to do during the day.
What constitutes as work or play has to do with frustrations, stress, and boredom. The flow state has to do with our emotional state and regulation during certain activities regarding those activities. When people get stressed or bored, they become distracted because their emotions are telling them that they need to be doing something else. This is where procrastination starts because you eventually have to come back to that stress/boredom. If you are coming back from procrastination, then you are mentally primed to more easily feel stressed or bored again, and the cycle repeats until you finish the task, which would bring you a sense of joy and relief from having to go back to that frustration. If the nature of your work is more or less the same, then you are prone to falling into the same cycle again. Doing this for a long time is what people call burning out.
One way to break up the monotony is to introduce variety in people’s work. I suspect this would help some but not others. I think a better metric would be to find the type of work that would match with the person’s interest, thus maximizing their level of engagement in the activities, leading to a flow state. Society’s demand for efficiency forces people to lock into singular career paths, which might actually be rather counterproductive on a large scale.
I suspect that we shouldn’t talk about “work” in abstract, because the details matter a lot. People can feel tired after returning from a job, and yet work hard the whole weekend on their hobby without getting tired.
To me it feels like after my brain accumulates a certain amount of frustration, it stops being efficient, until it gets a reset. The reset may be simply taking a lunch, especially if I succeed to forget about my work during the lunch.
Difficulty of work is not a problem per se. This weekend I studied a lot about jQuery and ePub, for fun. My work usually isn’t more difficult than that. What makes me feel tired is: meetings, frequent artificial deadlines, unclear assignments, communication with not-friendly people, etc. I can work 12 hours a day on my hobby. I cannot imagine working more than 8 hours a day (and I strongly wish I could work much less) on a job as usual.
To build on this, most online articles aren’t even based on the research that lynettebye was covering here. Instead, they’re based on polls and surveys, often by marketing companies. If we’re lucky, it’s associative data from epidemiological studies linking work issues to disease.
In those polls and surveys, they’re often pointing out that people are wasting time on too much frustrating, un-chosen work, and that as a consequence of the amount of nonsense they have to put up with, they only get a few hours of productive work in per day.
This gets spun as “people can only work a few productive hours per day,” as if it was innate human capacity, rather than crappy work conditions, that were the limiting factor.
Yeah. How long I can work depends on how crappy the work is. This could also explain why CEOs and similar are happy to spend long hours at job… they probably have way more power over their working conditions than I do. Pretty sure they have a room where they can close the door for a moment.
Sounds like you’re describing autonomy, mastery, and meaning—some of the big factors that are supposed to influence job satisfaction. 80,000 Hours has an old but nice summary here https://80000hours.org/articles/job-satisfaction-research. I expect job satisfaction and the resulting motivation make a huge difference on hours you can work productively.
Yes.
With motivation, focusing on your work is easy. Without motivation, you burn your self-discipline, and then you give up.
So, without motivation it becomes a question of how many hours worth of self-discipline you have, or rather how many you can pretend you have. With motivation, it is only a question of what else do you also need to do during the day.
What constitutes as work or play has to do with frustrations, stress, and boredom. The flow state has to do with our emotional state and regulation during certain activities regarding those activities. When people get stressed or bored, they become distracted because their emotions are telling them that they need to be doing something else. This is where procrastination starts because you eventually have to come back to that stress/boredom. If you are coming back from procrastination, then you are mentally primed to more easily feel stressed or bored again, and the cycle repeats until you finish the task, which would bring you a sense of joy and relief from having to go back to that frustration. If the nature of your work is more or less the same, then you are prone to falling into the same cycle again. Doing this for a long time is what people call burning out.
One way to break up the monotony is to introduce variety in people’s work. I suspect this would help some but not others. I think a better metric would be to find the type of work that would match with the person’s interest, thus maximizing their level of engagement in the activities, leading to a flow state. Society’s demand for efficiency forces people to lock into singular career paths, which might actually be rather counterproductive on a large scale.